1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to a rinser dryer system, and more particularly, pertains to a rinser dryer with a removable process bowl for achieving rapid external process bowl exchange such as for cleansing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior art rinsers and dryers, such as for silicon wafers, have provided for washing and rising of wafer chips, but have not provided for a process and means of cleansing a device should the fragile silicon or gallium arsenide wafers, substrates, masks or disks break or disintegrate during high speed spinning in rinsing or drying processes.
Long down times are required to clean and remove silicon wafer particles from the prior art rinsers and dryers, often causing lengthy delays in a sequence of processing steps involved in the processing of silicon wafers. Operator error also causes improper processing of silicon wafers due to inattentiveness on the part of the operator or misunderstanding of the process by the operator.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,300,581, entitled "Centrifugal Wafer Processor", issued Nov. 17, 1981, is assigned to the same assignee of this patent. While effective for the purpose intended, the bowl in that patent is not quickly nor easily removable. The present invention incorporates new and novel interchangeable bowl structure from panel access and structure, particle collector, gaseous venting structure, a probe well and related structure thereto, for processing of a member.
The present invention overcomes the deficiencies of the prior art by providing a rinser dryer process chamber including a removable quick change chamber bowl for cleansing, and removable fragment collector for removal of chip debris external to the rinser dryer framework.